Policies and Procedures

Examples for use by Supplementary and Mother Tongue Schools.

Produced for Southwark Children's Services by: Southwark Supplementary Education and Mother Tongue Association (SSEMTA)

What Polices and Procedures are required by Law?

As part of SSEMTA’s commitment to ensuring that Supplementary and Mother Tongue Schools are supported to provide good quality services for the children they serve and to be aware of relevant legislative requirements we have been consulting Central Government to obtain some clarity regarding policies and procedures essential to comply with the law.

To date (March 2009) the Department of Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) has been unable to provide SSEMTA with any information regarding policies that supplementary and mother tongue schools are specifically required by law or by DCSF to have in place.

They are at the moment funding a considerable amount of mapping and research and therefore no doubt recommendations will follow in due course.

The DCSF have, however, funded National Resource Centre, ContinYou (www.continyou.org.uk/...) to develop and promote a quality framework. The proposed quality framework is the closest we have been able to obtain to a description of the policies and procedures that central government expects.

NRC have confirmed that the quality framework will include a code of practice and a management file which includes the following information:

• Standard description of the supplementary or mother tongue school
• Statement of aims
• List of Management committee
• Equal Opportunities Statement
• List of staff and Volunteers Job Descriptions and role descriptions
• Staffing and volunteer policy
• Child Protection policy
• Health and Safety policy
• Risk assessments
• Offsite procedures
• Pupil's enrolment form
• Registers of attendance
• Financial rules (including petty cash rules)
• Accounts
• Certificate of Public Liability Insurance

This is of course only a general guide. There are many other possible policies that groups could want to put in place and possibly not all groups would feel the need to have all of the above. It all depends upon the nature of the work and the way groups operate.

In view of the information collected so far SSEMTA has built a collection of sample documents from a variety of sources. We have collated a selection of example policies which supplementary and mother tongue schools are invited to refer to when developing their own policies and procedures.

Please note that there is no such thing as a model policy that is suitable for all organizations. Therefore each of the documents in this section of our website will need some adaptation to meet the needs of your own organization and its activities.

Please feel free to customize all these documents so that they are just right for you.

In collecting the information for this section of our website we have drawn from documents prepared by:

LVAC
PVSF
OBAC
IBA
CR TRAINING
IVAC
WRIGHTON EDUCATIONAL SERVCES
CAS
NRC
and many others.

We thank the document producers for making the policies available for public use and we apologize for any unintentional omissions in the acknowledgements above. Please contact us if your own organization’s work has not been listed above.

Contents

(click to download the Word document)

1. Getting Started - guidelines for starting a voluntary organization
2. Becoming a Company
3. Example Memorandum and Articles of Association
4. Example Constitution
5. Guide to employing teaching staff
6. Sample Brief Job Description - teacher
7. Sample Brief Job Description - coordinator
8. Sample Brief Job Description - administrator
9. Model Policy for safe storage of Disclosures
10. Model Policy for recruitment of ex-offenders
11. Model Equal Opportunities Policy
12. Sample Child Protection Policy
13. Example Staff Handbook
14. Example Volunteer Policy
15. Example Financial Procedures

Please note that further policies and guidelines will be added to the site as sourced or prepared.

If the policy you need is not yet on the website please contact us by email or phone and we will do our best to help you.